Picking a Domain Name
Yesterday we posted an article on “Sustainable vs. Disposable Business Models” for webpages. With this distinction in mind, we will examine how to pick a domain name for each type of business model.
I am writing this post under obligation, since due to the rules of my “Public Challenge” I have to disclose all techniques before I can use them and I going to buy the domain names for my new business tonight.
If you are getting into a disposable business model then you really want to think in terms of the SEO benefit. No one knows what SEO will look like in the future, especially with the increased popularity of social bookmarking as well as advent of Google’s Search Wiki.
In spite of a changing climate in the SEO world, at the moment domain name choice still seems to carry great weight in the field of keyword relevance. This being the case, we want to look for keywords that provide good value and then check to see if we can find tightly matched domains for these keywords.
The gold standard, in my opinion for keyword research is WordTracker.com. However, since the price for a monthly subscription is currently about $60 a month, and since our philosophy here at Feedback Secrets is to not spend money on software until you online business is established, I will recommend Google’s free tool at “Google AdWords: Keyword Tool”.
What I like most about this tool is the “Advertiser Competition” column which quickly shows your at-a-glance which keywords are currently providing value. One way to think of value for keywords / keyphrases is as ratio of the number of searches done on that term per month divided by the total number of indexed webpages competing for that term.
Let’s use this keyword tool and do a trial run using the keyphrase “sugar glider” which is a popular exotic pet. In the list of related keyphrases, which the tool returned, the first one that jumps out at me as a real value is the keyphrase “sugar glider pets”.
When I did a quick search for this term on Google, the top 3 results I got were.
exoticpets.about.com/cs/sugargliders/a/sgaspets.htm exoticpets.about.com/cs/sugargliders/p/sugargliders.htm
www.angelfire.com/tx/facehugger/sg.html
This is a great sign since none of these 3 URLs have the term “sugar glider” in the domain itself. The first two have “sugargliders” appear in the subdomain and the third is completely void of the term ”sugarglider” anywhere in the URL. These are all signs of an opportunity!
The fourth URL that showed up in the search results for me is even more interesting! It’s PetSugarGliders.com which I was kind of surprised to not see in the top 3 results until I looked at the page title and content. I think these guys did themselves a bit of a disservice in terms of on-page optimization since they split their focus between both sugar gliders and hedgehogs.
With this information in mind I went over to GoDaddy.com to do a domain name search. Typing in petsugargliders.com and hitting search I saw that petsugargliders.net seems to be available at the moment. Also searching for sugargliderpets.com I see that sugargliderpets.net and sugargliderpets.org seem to also be currently available. I think that any of these three domains, with white hat on-page and off-page optimization could bust into the top 3 spots the way things stand right now.
I know that with Google Search Wiki, the concept of “top 3” has become a little more arbitrary, but I wouldn’t consider the concept totally meaningless yet.
If you are building a site around a sustainable business model, it may be helpful to consider some of the techniques we have just mentioned for disposable business models. The other side of the coin, when it comes to sustainable business models, is that if your site becomes popular enough, the number of people searching, on the search engines for your site’s name should increase.
For example, consider Darren Rowse’s popular blog at Problogger.net. If we use the same Google Keyword Tool we mentioned above, and type in the phrase “problogger” we can see that the keyphrase received approximately 8,100 searches on Google in the Month of December, 2008. I am almost willing to guarantee you that if you go back a few years to a time before Darren had started the site, there wouldn’t be nearly as many searches for this term.
I hope you enjoyed our little case study. If you have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions on the subject of picking a domain name, we would love to hear from you in the comments!
Related Posts
January 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Great approach and I like the example you used. When I’m looking at domains, ajaxwhois.com is a fast way to see what’s available. The site is hooked up to GoDaddy once you’re ready to make a purchase.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:35 am
I just tried out AjaxWhoIs and I must say, I like it a lot! The fact that you don’t need to click anything to get the results makes the whole experience super fast.
Great suggestion, thanks for the share!